Tag: pirate bay

Hyper-intellectual popular beat combo artist Kayne West thinks that he can bring down Pirate Bay.

Last weekend, West announced that his new album, The Life of Pablo, would be sold exclusively as a download from his website and the artist-driven streaming music service Tidal.

He does have a few fans who support his war on people who read books and sent Tidal to No. 1 on the U.S. Apple App Store. West pulled the album from his site and announced it wouldn’t be released on other streaming services.

What happened next was pretty obvious to everyone but West. His album was pirated by shedloads of people who put it on Pirate Bay.

According to Hollywood Lire West is going to meet with his legal team to discuss the possibilities of starting legal action against torrent site Pirate Bay.

“He’s going to talk to his lawyers and see where he stands, and hopefully Tidal will partner up with him in any legal proceedings because it was supposed to be an exclusive release. He certainly feels he has a case, with the two factors he’s mulling over being copyright infringement and loss of earnings.”

There are all sorts of reasons why this will be daft. The Pirate Bay administrators would have to actually show up in court. They would have to lose the standard argument that hosting torrents is not the same as hosting pirated content. Then they would remove the torrents in question after a few years.

One Pirate Bay there are more than 9,000 users currently sharing the album for others to download at any given moment. Even if Pirate Bay disappeared there are also lots of other pirate sites sharing West’s album and each of them would need to be sued individually.

West would be better off recouping lost profits by offering his album on more platforms. But if he absolutely wants to pick just one, it probably shouldn’t be Tidal. Lily Allen once wrote on Twitter that Tidal was too pricy and the mass popularity of the artist co-owners, could result in crippling the music industry and increasing piracy.

A Swedish court has told Big Content that the legal system can’t be used to force ISPs to ban whoever a music or film mogul does not like.

The District Court of Stockholm court ruled that the country’s internet service providers cannot be forced to block controversial Swedish file-sharing site Pirate Bay.

Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music, Nordisk Film and the Swedish Film Industry wanted to force Swedish ISP Bredbandsbolaget block Pirate Bay because it was ignoring their calls. Its argument was that if the ISP was not censoring whoever Big Content said it should, then it was helping the pirates.

But the court found that Bredbandsbolaget’s operations do not amount to participation in the copyright infringement offences carried out by some of its ‘pirate’ subscribers.

Bredbandsbolaget said that is only job was to provide customers with internet access and ensuring the free-flow of information, it should not be forced into the censorship business.

Presiding Chief Magistrate Anders Dereborg said that the court said it is not in a position to authorise such a ban as the rights holders want and therefore rejects their request.

The move was a little unexpected. The courts have been rolling over for Big Content through-out Europe. The only EU country that has not done so has been the Netherlands.

The Pirate Bay was founded in Sweden in 2003, allows users to share music, film and other files using bit torrent technology, or peer-to-peer links offered on the site.

In 2009 Fredrik Neij and three other Swedes connected with The Pirate Bay were found guilty of being accessories to copyright infringement by a Swedish court.

They were each given one-year jail terms and ordered to pay $3.6 million in compensation.

The Dutch Supreme Court has referred a landmark case against the file-sharing website Pirate Bay to the European Court of Justice.

It is a move that could lead to a precedent in efforts to curtail the sharing of copyrighted movies and music online.

Pirate Bay, which opened in 2003, provides links to files stored on other users’ computers. Its creators have faced legal action for copyright infringement in several countries, but the Dutch case widens its persecution.

Needless to say Big Content is jolly happy about it all. Lawyers working for the represents Dutch industry group Stichting Brein say that if they can get a ruling from the highest European Union court it will be possible to block peer-to-peer sites.

In 2010, Brein asked a Dutch court to order internet service providers XS4LL and Ziggo, which is owned by Liberty Global to block Pirate Bay.

Van Manen said it opens the way for legal action against other internet providers and “will set the standard for the entire EU”.

The Luxembourg-based court has been asked to consider two main points: whether Pirate Bay’s actions infringe European copyright laws and to what extent a court can order internet providers to block subscribers access to illegal websites.

In a surprising turn around, the Swedish Police have started investigating the antics of movie studio piracy trolls.

Two Pirate Bay co-founders have been questioned by Swedish police, acting on behalf of the FBI. The officers were looking for information on Pirate Bay backups and logs as part of an investigation into the honeypot scheme of Prenda.

Prenda was uploading its own torrents to The Pirate Bay, creating a honeypot for the people they later sued over pirated downloads.

The Pirate Bay provided the evidence that tied a user account and uploads to Prenda and its boss John Steele.

It is fairly serious allegation and the fact that the FBI is interested suggests that more serious charges could be flying Prenda’s way.

Pirate Bay co-founders Peter Sunde and Fredrik Neij have said that the coppers had asked them for help in an investigation which has being going on for a year.

“They wanted to know if I could verify the accuracy of the IP-address logs, how they were stored, and how they could be retrieved,” Neij told Torrent Freak .

It would be deeply ironic if the same trolls who were making a killing from placing honeypots on the Pirate Bay site was actually bought to justice by the same site.

British Prime Minster David “one is an ordinary bloke” Cameron’s censorship of the internet campaign is killing off legitimate businesses.

Cameron favoured internet censorship to protect “the children” from the perils of the internet, when they should be more worried about being left in pubs by their parents. He was also “lobbied” by high profile people in the movie industry to protect them from privacy.

However the blockade of the Pirate Bay by UK ISPs is causing trouble for CloudFlare. This is because one of a Pirate Bay proxy is hosted behind the same IP-addresses as a proxy site called ilikerainbows.co.uk.

In addition to blocking domain names, Sky also blocks IP-addresses. This allows the site to stop https connections to The Pirate Bay and its proxies, but when IP-addresses are shared with random other sites they’re blocked too.

CDN service CloudFlare, has found itself on the UK blocklist and any of its legitimate clients are blocked.

CloudFlare asked the proxy site to resolve the matter with Sky, or else it would remove the site from the network after 24 hours.

“If this issue does not get resolved with SkyB though we will need to route your domain off CloudFlare’s network as it is currently impacting other CloudFlare customers due to these blocked IP addresses.”

The operator of the “Rainbows” TPB proxy was surprised by Sky’s overbroad blocking techniques, but also by CloudFlare’s response. Would CloudFlare also kick out sites that are blocked in other countries where censorship is common?

This is not the first time that CloudFlare customers have been blocked by mistake. Earlier this year the same thing happened to sites that shared an IP-address with The Pirate Bay.

What is weird about the whole situation is that website blocking is not changing anything as pirates are getting around all the blocks. All that is happening is more real businesses are getting hit as collateral damage.

A court in the European Union has decided that Europeans are allowed to pirate content if they do so in a particular way.

Apparently if an internet user is streaming copyrighted content online, it’s legal for the user, who isn’t willfully making a copy of said content to view it. The pirate can only watch it directly through a web browser, streaming it from a website that hosts it, but it will be perfectly legal.

The ruling comes as part of a legal battle between a European media service Meltwater that used to include headlines from various news stories in daily digests sent to readers via email. Copyright holders including the Associated Press sued the company.

But in Europe the case crossed into strange territory. The group suing Meltwater argued that recipients of Meltwater’s emails had to pay license fees for the content they received, and the court basically ruled that Internet users who see content online, without actually willingly making a copy of it, should not be held accountable for any resulting copyright infringement.

Meltwater is not off the hook, but its clients certainly are. It also means that if someone streams content from their website they can’t be done for piracy. It does mean that viewers cannot be prosecuted.

This should be good news for all those German unternet users who received fines at home for streaming certain porn videos from a site last year.

Sunde may have been living in Germany in recent years and Sweden’s Supreme Court had, as recently as May, rejected an appeal from him.

Pirate Bay, launched in 2003, provided links to music and movie files that were stored on other users’ computers. The website is still functioning. On its website, Pirate Bay says it is now run by a different organisation and is registered in the Seychelles.

P2P outfit the Pirate Bay stuck two fingers up at big content yet again by releasing a ‘Pirate Browser’ which it claims would allows users to access the Pirate Bay and other blocked websites.

Fully functional, the browser works with Windows and does not have any adware or toolbars bundled with it.

Writing on its blog, TPB said that it’s a simple one-click browser that circumvents censorship and blockades and makes the site instantly available and accessible.

There’s no bundled adware, toolbars or other bloat, just a pre-configured Firefox browser.

The browser is basically a bundled package consisting of the Tor client and Firefox Portable browser. The package also includes some tools meant for evading censorship in countries like the UK, Finland, Denmark, and Iran.

Until now TPB has been recommending the use of proxy sites to browse the website from countries where it has been blocked. But it thinks its browser can effectively bypass any blockade enforced by ISPs.

The Pirate Bay says: “This browser is just to circumvent censorship, to remove limits on accessing sites governments don’t want you to know about”.

The Pirate Browser would allow users to browse websites like KickassTorrents, Fenopy and H33T which have been blocked by many countries including the UK. IsoHunt may also be accessed from Italy which was blocked earlier this month.

Pirate Bay co-founder and former spokesperson Peter Sunde plans to run for European Parliament next year on the Finnish Pirate Bay ticket.

The fact that he is facing a prison sentence for his involvement with BitTorrent doesn’t seem to concern him very much. He has been fighting the sentence for a while and if he gets elected things might get very interesting indeed. The Pirate Party already has two MEPs, courtesy of Swedish file sharing fans.

“I am doing what I can to help solve the problems we have today, as well as the ones we will have in the future,” Sunde told TorrentFreak. “Even though I’m not a politician, or perhaps because of that, I think that my experiences and knowledge could help create the solutions we’re in dire need of”.

Sunde says he wants to tackle the growing influence of copyright lobbyists and corporate interests in Europe. Patent reform and legalising non-commercial file sharing are also on his agenda.

Sunde said that he reached out to Kim Dotcom to join the race for parliament, but he declined, as he has other things on his mind. Now that would have been an interesting candidacy.

The Pirate Bay has found a new home for its popular torrent website on the Caribbean island of St. Martin.

This is not the first time that St Martin has been the home of pirates. In the mid-sixteenth century, pirates, privateers and smugglers were attracted by the increasing volume of shipping, especially since cargo included Mexican or Peruvian silver. For more than 300 years the islands were used by those who actually said “Yo ho ho” and it was one of the biggest importers of parrots and peg legs.

After a complaint issued by Swedish prosecutors threatened the Icelandic domain the file-sharers have reappared with a new .sx domain name.

Iceland should have been a safe harbour for the Pirate Bay. The Icelandic domain registry even told TorrentFreak that it would not take action against the Pirate Bay unless specifically ordered to do so by Icelandic authorities.

However, while the Icelandic government did not make any moves against it, it seems that the Pirate Bay moved to avoid new action from Swedish prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad, who filed an official complaint on behalf of several movie, music and publishing companies.

The complaint called for the seizure of two of Pirate Bay’s Swedish domains (thepiratebay.se and piratebay.se) as well as the company’s new Icelandic domain, claiming jurisdiction because the owner, Fredrik Neij, was a Swedish national.

Although the court has not yet granted Ingblad’s request, the Pirate Bay has taken defensive manoeuvres by moving to St. Martin instead.

St Martin is a small island 190 miles east of Puerto Rico with about 78,000 residents which know how to treat a pirate properly, but it is unlikely that the outfit will remain there.

Ingblad is likely file a new complaint against the .sx site and the Pirate Bay will continue registering domains in new countries to stay ahead.